Andover will be leaning on the New England Chapter of the Anti-Femation League for guidance and resources in combatting hate speech. Andover Public Schools will conduct faculty and staff training with the ADL, and will reach out to local rabbis, priests, ministers, and others to lead a public forum at the school early next year.

I was getting ready to post this article just to note this horrendously insensitive action on the eve of . When this mistype made me chuckle. But mainly the thing is that this happened as the third recent event, just 15 miles down the road On the jst prior to the start of Hanukah. Where does this insane hatred come frown? I just don't get it.

Cheers.
]]>Politics and Religion ForumBostonTimhttp://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74350http://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74349&goto=newpost
Wed, 13 Dec 2017 14:29:27 GMTAn unlikely candidate wins a presidential election by reaching out to a forgotten constituency and riding it to the White House.
One party now...An unlikely candidate wins a presidential election by reaching out to a forgotten constituency and riding it to the White House.

One party now controls the White House, the House and the Senate.

That party looks to fulfill a long-term desire and rams through an unpopular bill using the reconciliation procedure in the Senate to avoid the need for a cloture vote.

With the unpopular legislation almost ready to pass a shocking election result flips a senate seat in a state considered the safest in the country for the party in power.

Now the party in power is planning to ram a flawed bill through a vote to put it on the Presidents desk before the new Senator is seated.

Is it 2017, or 2009.

The scenarios are not EXACTLY the same, the Dems had 60 votes in 2010 and only turned to reconciliation after Scott Brown was elected but the GOP has best beware. Passing the ACA cost the Democrats the House and Senate and frankly set the stage for the tea party and Donald Trump in 2016.

Sure the bill is more popular now but the political calculus is still the same. You ram through this bill and you will in all likelihood lose Congress next fall.
]]>Politics and Religion ForumDarth Despothttp://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74349Is it better for the Democrats if Roy Moore wins or if he loses?http://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74346&goto=newpost
Tue, 12 Dec 2017 14:42:28 GMTI can't decide on this one. Changing the balance of the Senate from 52-48 to 51-49 would be big. The Dems would only need to pick up 2 moderate Republicans to kill a Repub bill instead of 3, and it would make the math better for their taking back control in 2018 (not sure when Sessions' term expires).

On the other hand, having pedophile Yosemite Sam as a rallying point for the midterms (he's probably not the kind of guy who will be a quiet back bencher) may be worth more in motivating their base for the midterms (and splintering Republicans) than that one Senate vote is worth. No Senate election in my lifetime has gotten the kind of coverage this has - Scott Brown taking Teddy's seat was a minor footnote compared to this. If Moore wins, that coverage isn't likely to let up.

Do you think it would be more valuable for the Democrats for Roy Moore to lose today, or for him to win?
]]>Politics and Religion ForumMark_Hendersonhttp://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74346The slow but painfully funny death of the MSMhttp://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74340&goto=newpost
Mon, 11 Dec 2017 13:14:34 GMTAs we enter the Golden Age of the death of mainstream media as a primary, relevant, and reliable news source...let us recognize, witness, and record...As we enter the Golden Age of the death of mainstream media as a primary, relevant, and reliable news source...let us recognize, witness, and record it's downfall...all of this following ABC's Stock Market prank....ROFL

The U.S. Media Suffered Its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages: Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened

Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.

The spectacle began on Friday morning at 11 a.m. EST, when the Most Trusted Name in News™ spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the DNC emails before they were published on the internet. As CNN sees the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks and, more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the U.S. intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.

This entire revelation was based on an email which CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its possession. The email was sent by someone named “Michael J. Erickson” — someone nobody had heard of previously and whom CNN could not identify — to Donald Trump, Jr., offering a decryption key and access to DNC emails that WikiLeaks had “uploaded.” The email was a smoking gun, in CNN’s extremely excited mind, because it was dated September 4 — 10 days before WikiLeaks began promoting access to those emails online — and thus proved that the Trump family was being offered special, unique access to the DNC archive: likely by WikiLeaks and the Kremlin.

It’s impossible to convey with words what a spectacularly devastating scoop CNN believed it had, so it’s necessary to watch it for yourself to see the tone of excitement, breathlessness and gravity the network conveyed as they clearly believed they were delivering a near-fatal blow on the Trump/Russia collusion story:

There was just one small problem with this story: it was fundamentally false, in the most embarrassing way possible. Hours after CNN broadcast its story — and then hyped it over and over and over — the Washington Post reported that CNN got the key fact of the story wrong.

The email was not dated September 4, as CNN claimed, but rather September 14 — which means it was sent after WikiLeaks had already published access to the DNC emails online. Thus, rather than offering some sort of special access to Trump, “Michael J. Erickson” was simply some random person from the public encouraging the Trump family to look at the publicly available DNC emails that WikiLeaks — as everyone by then already knew — had publicly promoted. In other words, the email was the exact opposite of what CNN presented it as being.
How did CNN end up aggressively hyping such a spectacularly false story? They refuse to say. Many hours after their story got exposed as false, the journalist who originally presented it, Congressional reporter Manu Raju, finally posted a tweet noting the correction. CNN’s PR Department then claimed that “multiple sources” had provided CNN with the false date. And Raju went on CNN, in muted tones, to note the correction, explicitly claiming that “two sources” had each given him the false date on the email, while also making clear that CNN did not ever even see the email, but only had sources describe its purported contents:

All of this prompts the glaring, obvious, and critical question — one which CNN refuses to address: how did “multiple sources” all misread the date on this document, in exactly the same way, and toward the same end, and then feed this false information to CNN?

It is, of course, completely plausible that one source might innocently misread a date on a document. But how is it remotely plausible that multiple sources could all innocently and in good faith misread the date in exactly the same way, all to cause to be disseminated a blockbuster revelation about Trump/Russia/WikiLeaks collusion? This is the critical question that CNN simply refuses to answer. In other words, CNN refuses to provide the most minimal transparency to enable the public to understand what happened here.

Why does this matter so much? For so many significant reasons:

To begin with, it’s hard to overstate how fast, far and wide this false story traveled. Democratic Party pundits, operatives and journalists with huge social media platforms predictably jumped on the story immediately, announcing that it proved collusion between Trump and Russia (through WikiLeaks). One tweet from Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu, claiming that this proved evidence of criminal collusion, was re-tweeted thousands and thousands of times in just a few hours (Lieu quietly deleted the tweet after I noted its falsity, and long after it went very viral, without ever telling his followers that the CNN story, and therefore his accusation, had been debunked).

This tweet is from a member of Congress today. It was RT'd more than 7,000 times (and counting), and liked more than 15,000 times. It's based on a completely false claim, from a debunked CNN story. This happens over and over. This seems damaging. And still no retraction. https://t.co/fixSRKUxxx

Brookings’ Benjamin Wittes, whose star has risen as he has promoted himself as a friend of former FBI Director Jim Comey, not only promoted the CNN story in the morning, but did so with the word “Boom” — which he uses to signal that a major blow has been delivered to Trump on the Russia story — along with a gif of a cannon being detonated:

Incredibly, to this very moment — almost 24 hours after CNN’s story was debunked — Wittes has never noted to his more than 200,000 followers that the story he so excitedly promoted turned out to be utterly false, even though he returned to Twitter long after the story was debunked to tweet about other matters. He just left his false and inflammatory claims uncorrected.

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall believed the story was so significant that he used an image of an atomic bomb detonating at the top of his article discussing its implications, an article he tweeted to his roughly 250,000 followers. Only at night was an editor’s note finally added noting that the whole thing was false.
It’s hard to quantify exactly how many people were deceived — filled with false news and propaganda — by the CNN story. But thanks to Democratic-loyal journalists and operatives who decree every Trump/Russia claim to be true without seeing any evidence, it’s certainly safe to say that many hundreds of thousands of people, almost certainly millions, were exposed to these false claims.

Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy — which would presumably include all the people who have spent the last year lamenting Fake News, propaganda, Twitter bots and the like — would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended up filling so many people’s brains with totally false news. That alone should prompt demands from CNN for an explanation about what happened here. No Russian Facebook ad or Twitter bot could possibly have anywhere near the impact as this CNN story had when it comes to deceiving people with blatantly inaccurate information.

Second, the “multiple sources” who fed CNN this false information did not confine themselves to that network. They were apparently very busy eagerly spreading the false information to as many media outlets as they could find. In the middle of the day, CBS News claimed that it had independently “confirmed” CNN’s story about the email, and published its own breathless article discussing the grave implications of this discovered collusion.

Most embarrassing of all was what MSNBC did. You just have to watch this report from its “intelligence and national security correspondent” Ken Dilanian to believe it. Like CBS, Dilanian also claimed that he independently “confirmed” the false CNN report from “two sources with direct knowledge of this.” Dilanian, whose career in the U.S. media continues to flourish the more he is exposed as someone who faithfully parrots what the CIA tells him to say (since that is one of the most coveted and valued attributes in US journalism), spent three minutes mixing evidence-free CIA claims as fact with totally false assertions about what his multiple “sources with direct knowledge” told him about all this. Please watch this — again, not just the content but the tenor and tone of how they “report” — as it is Baghdad Bob-level embarrassing:
]]>Politics and Religion ForumBaron Samedihttp://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74340http://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74337&goto=newpost
Fri, 08 Dec 2017 15:24:16 GMT12/04/2017 Allan Stevo

If guilt is the best you have to offer a customer, you probably don't have that much to offer a customer.

When I walk into Walmart I know I will be able to get a wide selection of products, I will be able to get them cheap, and I will be able to get them with very little customer support or hassle. When I want that, it feels great. Fast, simple, cheap.

There is no guilt campaign from Walmart. There is no appeal to me about how bad of a person I am if I don't shop at Walmart. There are no protestors outside my houses or outside other stores convincing me it is bad to shop anywhere but Walmart. When I step foot in a Walmart, I go there because that is exactly what I want. I go there because they are better than anyone else at providing for me as a consumer in the ways that Walmart is so proficient in providing for me.

When I shop at Amazon.com, I get a wide selection of goods, at a cheap price with both the ease and occasional difficulty that comes with shopping online. They do that better than anyone else. When I want that, it feels great to turn to Amazon and get that, and to get it exactly as I expected, and to, often enough, be surprised by an experience that is even better than what I expected.

There is no guilt campaign from Amazon, there are no protestors outside my house convincing me it is bad to shop anywhere but Amazon. There are no online ads pointing out how immoral it is of me to shop anywhere that isn't Amazon. I use Amazon because Amazon is exactly what I want at that moment.

This is in sharp contrast with the average "mom and pop" shops.

When I step foot into a local shop, all too often, I find nothing remotely of value to me. It is an unpleasant experience with an unhelpful, or sometimes even rude and unknowledgeable salesperson.

I don't feel like I'm contributing to my community by shopping in such places. To the contrary, I hope most low value shops like that go out of business. The sooner they go out of business the better. By even being in existence they take up valuable real estate that can be used by others seeking to innovate the local space, to provide a better consumer experience, and to develop a better use for that local space.

Not only do I not feel guilty for not patronizing these mediocre local businesses, it makes me sad that they even exist. They are partially propped up by the guilt movement that encourages consumers to disregard all other benefits in favor of having the opportunity to shop locally, a movement I find misguided at best, more often ill-informed, and often enough willfully ignorant and therefore blatantly deceitful. The moral thing is to help bad local businesses go under by not patronizing them, and therefore helping to clean out that detritus that takes up valuable local brick and mortar space.

Confusing charity with shopping, confusing philanthropic activity with consumer activity benefits no one but the mediocre shop owner.

Shopping locally generally offers me only one added value — immediacy. I like shopping locally because it is nice to have an item that I want in my hand before I buy it so that I can look it over. It feels nice to have it in my hand ten minutes after I decide that I want it. Soon that will barely be an added value. With Amazon's same day delivery, it is already barely more immediate to shop for most things locally. If one can restrain oneself for an hour or two and not have truly immediate gratification, then Amazon, all things considered provides a far more valuable shopping experience to me than a local mom and pop on virtually all products. Also, while a minor added value, it is visually appealing to have an active business district. I am sure I can rather quickly adapt to a business district concept that looks different than what I am used to.

When I happen to sit down at a friend's or relative's home where the television is on, especially at this holiday time of year, I hear public service announcements about how important it is to shop locally. I sometimes hear as many as one or two segments on each news broadcast that interject how important it is to shop locally.

This is practically mindless — this "shop locally" pronouncement. Guilt about not shopping locally and feeling good about the idea of shopping locally is practically the only value proposition offered by local stores. Instead the pronouncement should be "shop at good shops," or "shop at shops that give you what you want and how you want it."

In some places — and the places are thankfully becoming more common — walking into a local store truly is brilliant. The reason some locales have such high quality stores, is precisely because some people were so unwilling to shop locally.

Because competition has upped the level of difficulty required to run a store, and driven so many bad stores out of business, we are left with increasingly better stores that are increasingly customer focused. For a consumer, that is a great shift in local businesses. Businesses that don't provide more local value than the guilt of "shop local" are becoming less common.

This is sadly not happening as quickly as it could. People stuck in an ideology, as thoughtless as any other ideology, profess that "buy local" is some sort of unchallengeable axiom, a fundamental, impossible to further elucidate truth that all people must profess and live by or otherwise are subject to moral condemnation.

Even in places like the bougie neighborhoods here in Brooklyn, that ideological attitude proliferates, along with its accompanying misguided moralism. This is substituted for a far-preferable constant pursuit of higher quality and higher customer satisfaction that pervades the free market and has led to so much development in quality of life over the past several hundred years since the Industrial Revolution.

I'd prefer that society start saying "stop shopping locally." The competition is good for local stores — they have to be the best possible thing, the most desired thing to even survive in such an environment.

The Walmart and the Amazons of the world came into the bush leagues and upped the competition to major league level. Of this, I am entirely grateful, and though I really like these companies and companies like them, I also look forward to the next generation of companies that squeeze the Walmarts and the Amazons of the world and perhaps even put them out of business. Of course, the established entities in a place had the new destabilizing competition. It's great for the consumer.

I will feel no guilt at such a moment. Guilt does not bring me value as a consumer and it is of limited value to me as a person. I will focus on feeling good about the benefits of what life offers.

Interested in what people think about this. I have some thoughts...some contradictory, even...but I'll withhold them for later.

I will give a single thought...because this article brought things to mind from my childhood.

Growing up, my grandfather often took me to SPAGS Hardware in Shrewsbury, I think it was. It was kind of like a Building #19 for hardware....a lot of boxes filled with stuff, more like a warehouse than a store. Stuff was inexpensive there, and my grandfather would buy bulk...an entire box of duct tape, or rope, as many screws, nuts, and nails as he could fit in the cart.

Noone ever criticized anyone for going to SPAGS, and my grandfather was relatively wealthy...an upper middle class engineer. He could afford pretty much anything he needed, anywhere he got it. But here's the thing...he used to brag about going to SPAGS, and what a great deal he got on this or that. Sometimes, he and one or more of hte neighbors would plan a trip together! Usually, they weren't going because they needed a specific item...they were just going to "stock up" their workshops. I remember they would bring me along to push the third cart...they each had one, and I had one. They bought that much stuff.

My grandfather also went to a lot of hardware auctions, businesses that were closing and such..and he would buy stuff by the "lot". Whatever...5 random small engies in a wooden box...bought...case of assorted wiring....bought...box full of assorted fittings...bought.

Mind you...this man was not in any way a hoarder...his workshop was large, impeccably organized. It wasn't one of those workbences with piles of junk on top of it and boxes of stuff stacked up.

My grandparents took pride in finding sales and buying things on the cheap. They actually didn't want to "get taken" by the local hardware store's and their crazy prices (relative to SPAGS).

Now, that is very anecdotal...but it occurs to me...was SPAGS any different than Walmart? What's changed? Have we changed, actually? Would our grandparents frown on us, or laugh at us and the way we think as consumers?

I was thinking that my grandfather might suggest something like this...."You can pay $10 for that hammer at Home Depot, or you can spend $15 for that hammer at Joe's Hardware. If you want to spend $15, go get your hammer for $10 and give the extra $5 to the young man at the cash register. You can get ripped off, or get a good deal and do a good deed at the same time."

I have more thoughts...but I figure I'll start there. I think I am having trouble with mixing consumerism with morality...and I suspect I am not alone.
]]>Politics and Religion ForumBaron Samedihttp://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74337Thinking out loud-blind spotshttp://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74312&goto=newpost
Thu, 30 Nov 2017 15:35:12 GMTAs I have watched the Alabama senate race unfold some thoughts have been crystallizing that, to me, help explain some of the current state of our 2...As I have watched the Alabama senate race unfold some thoughts have been crystallizing that, to me, help explain some of the current state of our 2 major parties.

I've read a bunch of comments sections to try and understand why someone would vote for Moore. It's been almost universal. Most of the Republicans voting for Moore are doing so because abortion is their litmus test. No matter how awful a candidate is, if the choice is between pro-life and pro-choice the social conservative voter doesn't even need to think about it, and they are going to get this clown elected.

The Democrats look at this and think "no matter, a significant majority favor abortion rights" but here's the blind spot. Maybe 15% to 20% of the electorate fits the parameters I laid out above, but the balance are not automatically (D) voters. They look at the issues and pick and choose. But they don't all vote as a block.

It's the same basic math on the Gun Control vs 2nd amendment issue, but not quite as cut and dried (there is such a thing as a pro-2nd amendment democrat).

One of the reasons the GOP has been so good at winning elections is their ability to create these litmus test blocks that probably give them around 35-40 percent natural support. An added benefit is the folks voting on these major issues (to the voter) are highly motivated and get out an vote.

The new block is the nationalists/nativist block. They are the hard-core Trump supporters.

But, there is still the GOP blind spot.

They use these motivated single issue voters to get elected, but these voters do not necessarily support the rest of the GOP agenda. The pro-choice crowd doesn't all want to trash the ACA, the 2nd amendment folks don't want to see cuts to Social Security and the Nativists sure as hell don't want to support free trade. If the polls are to be believed the support among Republican rank and file for the "tax reform" legislation is lukewarm at best.

This is why the GOP is having such a hard time governing. The voters don't really support the agenda, which at the end of the day has always been slanted towards big business/big money.

It's an interesting dilemma to watch play out.
]]>Politics and Religion ForumDarth Despothttp://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74312Susan Sarandonhttp://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74306&goto=newpost
Mon, 27 Nov 2017 17:40:10 GMTSusan Sarandon: ‘I thought Hillary was very dangerous. If she'd won, we'd be at war’ Once the bete noire of the right, now the actor finds herself even more hated by the left for refusing to support Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump. She talks about Hollywood sexism, female empowerment and playing Bette Davis

Susan Sarandon at 71 is bright-eyed and airy, and perhaps shyer than she can publicly seem. When I walk into the room – a private members’ club in downtown New York, where she sits with a small dog at her feet – she doesn’t say hello or make eye-contact, giving what I suspect is a false impression of rudeness. It may also be that she is uncertain of her reception. For a long time Sarandon was despised by the right, her protests against the Vietnam war and US aggression in Nicaragua and Iraq making her the kind of target that, for progressives, is an affirmation of sorts. Her latest unpopularity, by contrast, comes exclusively from the left and is much tougher on Sarandon. “I’m not attacked from the right at all,” she will tell me. Instead, she is accused of not checking her white privilege, of throwing away her vote on a third-party candidate (the Green party nominee, Jill Stein) during the US presidential election, and of recklessly espousing a political cause that let Trump in through the backdoor. Liberals in the US, it seems, can summon more hatred for Sarandon right now than they can for Paul Ryan.

Most infuriating of all, to her critics, is that she won’t admit her error. Sarandon’s very physiognomy suggests defiance; she looks indignant even at rest. She also looks a lot like Bette Davis, so much so that Davis herself, in her dotage, approached Sarandon to play her. That project never happened, but in the new eight-part Ryan Murphy series Feud: Bette and Joan, about the battle for Hollywood supremacy between Davis and Joan Crawford, Sarandon gets her chance. The two leads are terrific: Jessica Lange, by turns monstrous and pathetic as Crawford; Sarandon steelier, smarter, less obviously vulnerable. She sees a lot of similarities between herself and Davis. “We’re both east coast,” she says. “I didn’t consider myself a star; I was a character actor from the very beginning and not really sold as pretty, which is probably what’s allowed me to survive as long as I have. I have this broader phase.”

Sarandon is working well beyond the age at which women in Hollywood’s golden era could expect to carry on – “besides playing witches and bitches,” she says. The interesting thing about Feud is that it tells an unavoidably feminist story about two women who would have abhorred that particular term. A few years ago, Sarandon herself said: “I think of myself as a humanist because I think it’s less alienating to people who think of feminism as being a load of strident bitches.”

“And then suddenly it became OK to say feminist,” she says now. “That’s been very recent. There was a period when that wasn’t really happening. So now there’s been an opportunity to include men as allies. And I have to say, I remember going to the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] march where there were 100,000 women and we were going around talking to senators for this vote and I got on the elevator, and the women were like: ‘We’re going to show them what the **** we want.’ And I kept saying: ‘Calm down, that’s not the way we’re going to get things done.’”

You thought it was counterproductive to be that angry? “It was counterproductive, clearly. But that image of the shrill woman became the definition of a feminist for a long time. And women had a right to be angry, and to feel empowered. But that was just one glimpse of a fairly emotional and strident definition, and there was a period when young women didn’t want that label.”

And now? “It’s come back, and it’s gotten warped, especially with the election, where if you’re a woman you have to support Hillary Clinton.”

Now, of course, no one in Sarandon’s industry would get caught dead having a flaky opinion on sexism in Hollywood. Still, the actor is cautious. One gets the feeling that the Harvey Weinstein business simply isn’t very interesting to Sarandon, that there are other causes – the Keystone pipeline, fracking, oil and gas money in politics – that she considers more urgent. She is no apologist for the Weinsteins of this world, but she can, at times, sound positively libertarian about where the responsibilities of the women involved lie.

“There are a lot of people who did say no,” she says. “I think the big question here is that if Harvey Weinstein exposed himself to you when you were on a yacht in Cannes and you told everybody – this is Angie Everhart’s story – and everyone said: ‘Well, that’s just Harvey’ and it wasn’t a big deal – those are the people who are perpetuating it, too. Now, I’m sure there’s a lot of men who were much smoother at seducing than-” she bursts out laughing – “James Toback and Harvey Weinstein, who a lot of women felt very flattered to be sleeping with, even if they didn’t get the job. There’s just a culture, starting in the 60s and 70s, where there was a certain amount of liberation that made it possible for those things to happen without even seeing yourself as a victim.”

One of the questions currently being asked is whether what Sarandon describes – the inability of many women even to conceptualise themselves as victims – is a function of “liberation” or internalised misogynistic denial. For Sarandon’s part, nothing post-Weinstein has made her reassess her own past. “Certainly, I experienced both having people come on to me and being told that I wasn’t interesting enough to get a part, or sexual enough, once they found out I was married,” she says. She also admits she was lucky; that, unlike many of the women coming forward today, Sarandon’s resolve was never put to the test. “In my case, I just said no, in many clumsy, stupid ways, but the people didn’t push on. They didn’t show up in my room. They didn’t corner me, or batter me, or get on top of me. It was an invitation: ‘Yeah, why don’t you spend the night now that you’re here in the middle of nowhere on location?’ And I said: ‘No, I gotta get back to my room.’ But I didn’t feel super offended, because it wasn’t a thing that became super difficult.”

There were other hard things. “I remember another really famous actress saying to me: ‘Well, don’t have children because that’ll really change the parts that you’ll be available for. And you won’t work past 40 anyway.’ And a lot of that has changed. And a lot of women are assessing how they feel; were they victimised or did they feel that it was their own choice?”

There is no question, she believes, that there are more choices today and that this is slowly correcting the imbalance of power. “More and more women are able to greenlight their own projects. My last few films have had women directors – they’re not the big blockbusters, but I’m not sure those big blockbusters are very interesting to direct. But there is definitely more power in the hands of women than there was – the Reese Witherspoons, who are getting books, putting together projects, telling women’s stories. I think that’s where the difference is. The culture itself is ... it’s a tricky thing because you are selling yourself using sex, and your looks, for the most part. And I think that when you have these men in positions of power, they assume that [sex] goes along with it. And until you get women to have an economic power base – I mean, look at Brit Marling’s article [in the Atlantic], where she talks about being able to walk out of an uncomfortable situation with Harvey even though she hated herself for going in the first place, because she knew she could write and produce and direct. So when people see themselves as having their own power base, it becomes imaginable that you could turn somebody down and still survive.”
]]>Politics and Religion ForumBaron Samedihttp://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74306Former Secret Service Agent Threatens to Reveal New Details About “Lolita Express”http://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74305&goto=newpost
Mon, 27 Nov 2017 15:01:06 GMTIn a furious twitter exchange with a Clinton aide on Friday, former secret service agent Dan Bongino threatened to reveal new details about Bill...In a furious twitter exchange with a Clinton aide on Friday, former secret service agent Dan Bongino threatened to reveal new details about Bill Clinton’s 26 documented trips aboard notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

Bongino and former Hillary Clinton aide Nick Merrill started feuding after Merrill challenged Bongino’s claim that Clinton was the most “manipulative political person in a position of power [he had] ever met in my entire life,” as Paul Watson pointed out.

Merrill fired back that Hillary “has enormous respect for the Secret Service & a great relationship with the agents on her detail.” He also alleged that Bongino was never on the Clintons’ detail – a claim that Bongino almost immediately disproved by supplying a photo of him sitting behind Hillary Clinton back in 2001.

This pic is from NY Newsday’s inside cover taken at the US Open in 2001. It’s one of literally hundreds of operations I conducted with Hillary documented throughly by official US govt paperwork of which I still have copies. You’re welcome to stop by & review the paperwork.Thanks. pic.twitter.com/C0lmJRlrDm

After accusing Merrill of being a “fraud”, Bongino dropped a ominous-sounding threat: “Be careful Nick, people know things not yet released publicly about your messiah Hillary. Don’t poke the bear loser, you may not like the results. #Epstein #EmailGate,” tweeted Bongino.

Be careful Nick, people know things not yet released publicly about your messiah Hillary. Don’t poke the bear loser, you may not like the results. #Epstein#EmailGate

For those who are unfamiliar with his story, Jeffrey Epstein is a New York City financier who pled guilty in 2008 to a single count of soliciting sex from an underage girl. He eventually spent 13 months in prison and was forced to register as a level three sex offender (considered the highest risk of re-offending) though stories of his lust for girls as young of 12 have spread like wildfire in recent years.

Epstein allegedly installed beds in his custom jet, and also purportedly filmed powerful men during romps with underage girls to obtain materials for blackmail.

According to Fox News, Epstein allegedly had a team of traffickers who procured girls as young as 12 to service his friends on Epstein’s “Orgy Island,” an estate on Little St. James in the US Virgin Islands. Epstein now lives permanently in the US Virgin Islands.

Clinton chose to continue his association with Epstein even after the lurid trial, according to the Alliance to Rescue Victims of Trafficking, “everyone within his inner circles knew was a pedophile.” Speculation that Clinton was involved with Epstein was noted in “Bill Clinton Was Here”: The Elite One-Percent’s ‘Orgy Island’ Exposed.” An article by the now defunct Gawker titled “Flight Logs Put Clinton, Dershowitz on Pedophile Billionaire’s Sex Jet” added to speculation about Clinton’s troubling relationship with the convicted sex offender.Epstein’s predatory past, and his now-inconvenient relationships with a Who’s Who of the Davos set, hit the front pages again earlier this month when one of his victims, Virginia Roberts, claimed in a federal court filing that Epstein recruited her as a “sex slave” at the age of 15 and “sexually trafficked [her] to politically-connected and financially-powerful people,” including Prince Andrew and attorney Alan Dershowitz. (The latter, the filing claimed, had sex with the victim “on private planes”; Dershowitz vigorously denies the charges, as does Prince Andrew.)

* * *

Two female associates of Epstein—the socialite Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein’s former assistant Sarah Kellen—have been repeatedly accused in court filings of acting as pimps for him, recruiting and grooming young girls into their network of child sex workers, and frequently participating in sex acts with them. Kellen in particular was believed by detectives in the Palm Beach Police Department, which was the first to start unraveling the operation, to be so deeply involved in the enterprise that they prepared a warrant for her arrest as an accessory to molestation and sex with minors. In the end, she was never arrested or charged, and federal prosecutors granted her immunity in a 2007 non-prosecution agreement that described her as a “potential co-conspirator” in sex trafficking.

Maxwell, the daughter of the late media mogul Robert Maxwell, has been accused by Roberts of photographing Epstein’s victims “in sexually explicit poses and [keeping] the child pornography on her computer,” and “engag[ing] in lesbian sex with the underage females she procured for Epstein.” She has denied the allegations in the past.

Clinton shared Epstein’s plane with Kellen and Maxwell on at least 11 flights in 2002 and 2003—before any of the allegations against them became public—according to the pilots’ logbooks, which have surfaced in civil litigation surrounding Epstein’s crimes. In January 2002, for instance, Clinton, his aide Doug Band, and Clinton’s Secret Service detail are listed on a flight from Japan to Hong Kong with Epstein, Maxwell, Kellen, and two women described only as “Janice” and “Jessica.” One month later, records show, Clinton hopped a ride from Miami to Westchester on a flight that also included Epstein, Maxwell, Kellen, and a woman described only as “one female.”
In 2002, as New York reported previously, Clinton recruited Epstein to make his plane available for a week-long anti-poverty and anti-AIDS tour of Africa with Kevin Spacey, Chris Tucker, billionaire creep Ron Burkle, Clinton confidant Gayle Smith (who now serves on Barack Obama’s National Security Council), and others. The logs from that trip show that Maxwell, Kellen, and a woman named Chauntae Davis joined the entourage for five days.

That last name, Chauntae Davies, emerged elsewhere in papers unearthed by the various investigations into Epstein’s sex ring: his little black book. Davies is one of 27 women listed in the book under an entry for “Massage- California,” one of six lists of massage girls Epstein kept in various locales, with a total of 160 names around the globe, many of them underage victims.

Today, Davies is an actress with credits including HBO’s Enlightened. In 2002, she was 23. According to her IMDB profile, in addition to her apparent massage work for Epstein, she landed a role that year as a “lingerie model” in Exposed, a movie produced by a softcore porn company called MRG Entertainment. (Other MRG films include Deviant Desires and Carnal Confessions; the company has since been purchased by Larry Flynt. Exposed, appropriately enough, was directed by a pseudonymous auteur who went by the name of Clinton J. Williams.) Davies’s role in Clinton’s flying AIDS-prevention circus isn’t clear, and though her LinkedIn page claims a certificate in Swedish massage, there is no evidence that she ever actually treated Epstein to one. Reached via e-mail, she said only, “I really am not interested in being slandered in the media for having known this person a time ago. Some of the things being said are not things I have information on.”

I don't think anything will come of any of this. The MSM has been obeying the "Ignore Pedogate" directive, and I doubt anything will change that.
]]>Politics and Religion ForumBaron Samedihttp://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74305The politics of Thanksgivinghttp://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74295&goto=newpost
Wed, 22 Nov 2017 17:31:02 GMTI thought people may find these Mises articles interesting regarding this, one of the very best Holidays, if not the best, in my opinion...
...I thought people may find these Mises articles interesting regarding this, one of the very best Holidays, if not the best, in my opinion...

Thanksgiving: Celebrating the Birth of American Free Enterprise

This time of the year, whether in good economic times or bad, is when Americans gather with their families and friends and enjoy a Thanksgiving meal together. It marks a remembrance of those early Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the uncharted ocean from Europe to make a new start in Plymouth, Massachusetts. What is less appreciated is that Thanksgiving also is a celebration of the birth of free enterprise in America.

The English Puritans, who left Great Britain and sailed across the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620, were not only escaping from religious persecution in their homeland. They also wanted to turn their back on what they viewed as the materialistic and greedy corruption of the Old World.

Plymouth Colony Planned as Collectivist Utopia

In the New World, they wanted to erect a New Jerusalem that would not only be religiously devout, but be built on a new foundation of communal sharing and social altruism. Their goal was the communism of Plato’s Republic, in which all would work and share in common, knowing neither private property nor self-interested acquisitiveness.

What resulted is recorded in the diary of Governor William Bradford, the head of the colony. The colonists collectively cleared and worked the land, but they brought forth neither the bountiful harvest they hoped for, nor did it create a spirit of shared and cheerful brotherhood.

The less industrious members of the colony came late to their work in the fields, and were slow and easy in their labors. Knowing that they and their families were to receive an equal share of whatever the group produced, they saw little reason to be more diligent in their efforts. The harder working among the colonists became resentful that their efforts would be redistributed to the more malingering members of the colony. Soon they, too, were coming late to work and were less energetic in the fields.

Collective Work Equaled Individual Resentment

As Governor Bradford of the Plymouth Colony explained in his old English (though with the spelling modernized):

For the young men that were able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children, without recompense. The strong, or men of parts, had no more division of food, clothes, etc. then he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labor, and food, clothes, etc. with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignant and disrespect unto them. And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc. they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could husbands brook it.

Because of the disincentives and resentments that spread among the population, crops were sparse and the rationed equal shares from the collective harvest were not enough to ward off starvation and death. Two years of communism in practice had left alive only a fraction of the original number of the Plymouth colonists.

Private Property as Incentive to Industry

Realizing that another season like those that had just passed would mean the extinction of the entire community, the elders of the colony decided to try something radically different: the introduction of private property rights and the right of the individual families to keep the fruits of their own labor.

As Governor Bradford put it:

And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number for that end . . . This had a very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted then otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little-ones with them to set corn, which before would a ledge weakness, and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

The Plymouth Colony experienced a great bounty of food. Private ownership meant that there was now a close link between work and reward. Industry became the order of the day as the men and women in each family went to the fields on their separate private farms. When the harvest time came, not only did many families produce enough for their own needs, but also they had surpluses that they could freely exchange with their neighbors for mutual benefit and improvement.

In Governor Bradford’s words:

By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God. And the effect of their planting was well seen, for all had, one way or other, pretty well to bring the year about, and some of the abler sort and more industrious had to spare, and sell to others, so as any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day.

Rejecting Collectivism for Individualism

Hard experience had taught the Plymouth colonists the fallacy and error in the ideas that since the time of the ancient Greeks had promised paradise through collectivism rather than individualism. As Governor Bradford expressed it:

The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years, and that amongst the Godly and sober men, may well convince of the vanity and conceit of Plato’s and other ancients; — that the taking away of property, and bringing into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For this community (so far as it was) was found to breed confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.

Was this realization that communism was incompatible with human nature and the prosperity of humanity to be despaired or be a cause for guilt? Not in Governor Bradford’s eyes. It was simply a matter of accepting that altruism and collectivism were inconsistent with the nature of man, and that human institutions should reflect the reality of man’s nature if he is to prosper. Said Governor Bradford:

Let none object this is man’s corruption, and nothing to the curse itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them.

The desire to “spread the wealth” and for government to plan and regulate people’s lives is as old as the utopian fantasy in Plato’s Republic. The Pilgrim Fathers tried and soon realized its bankruptcy and failure as a way for men to live together in society.

They, instead, accepted man as he is: hardworking, productive, and innovative when allowed the liberty to follow his own interests in improving his own circumstances and that of his family. And even more, out of his industry result the quantities of useful goods that enable men to trade to their mutual benefit.

Giving Thanks for the Triumph of Freedom

In the wilderness of the New World, the Plymouth Pilgrims had progressed from the false dream of communism to the sound realism of capitalism. At a time of economic uncertainty and growing political paternalism, it is worthwhile recalling this beginning of the American experiment and experience with economic freedom.

This is the lesson of the First Thanksgiving. This year, when we, Americans sit around our dining table with family and friends, we should also remember that what we are really celebrating is the birth of free men and free enterprise in that New World of America.

The true meaning of Thanksgiving, in other words, is the triumph of Capitalism over the failure of Collectivism in all its forms.

WTF?
]]>Politics and Religion ForumBig/Sky/Flyhttp://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74277What would it take...http://www.patriotsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=74273&goto=newpost
Thu, 16 Nov 2017 23:15:13 GMT...too convince you heathens there is a God?
Keep in mind what has been written about Him...
:D
I hope this goes somewhere......too convince you heathens there is a God?
Keep in mind what has been written about Him...
:D

November 16, 2017 marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the federal memorandum that ended the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) enrolled 600 indigent black-male sharecroppers in the study who were residents of Macon County, Alabama.

The study subjects were promised, among other services, free treatments for "bad blood" (a term that included the symptoms of anemia and lethargy as well as syphilis), treatments for other minor illnesses, and free burial if they agreed to an autopsy after their deaths. Of the 600 subjects, 399 were found to be infected with syphilis, while 201 were not.
The main controversy surrounds the arrival of penicillin in 1947. As a cure for syphilis, the Tuskegee researchers not only ignored it, they allegedly kept their subjects in the dark about it and prevented them, where possible, from being treated with it in other public-health programs in Macon County.

The Counter-narrative

Some political moderates and progressives are bitter about the mainstream account of Tuskegee because it has to some degree fostered suspicion of public-health programs, which they enthusiastically support. While there has been a counter-narrative about Tuskegee since its end, a renewed one has gained strength since Benedek and Erlen (1999).

Counter-narrative proponents point out that the study's title (Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male) reinforces in part that the study was an examination of men with late-stage dormant syphilis who were not contagious and who had the infection for five or more years. A 1950 report from the study itself documents that of 410 infected subjects selected from 1931-32 and 1932-33, 178 were in fact given the standard treatment of the time, neoarsphenamine.

The standard treatments of the day, arsenical compounds, were toxic (and as such had many adverse side effects), required a regimen that could consume about a year's time, and were of little reliability in terms of a cure. With such high costs and few benefits, patient non-compliance rates hovered about 80-90 percent. Add to this the fact that most syphilis patients who made it past the early stages of the disease without treatment experienced no further symptoms. In other words, it was anything but clear that subjecting a patient to a possible year-long regimen of arsenic poisoning was an obvious superior alternative to doing nothing.

As for penicillin, it was not standardized and widely available until about 1955 at the earliest, not 1947. By 1955, study subjects who were still alive had been infected for two decades or longer, thus their infections had either died off or been neutralized. For subjects with latent syphilis for another 17 years until the end of Tuskegee, penicillin would have done little if anything for their comfort or life expectancy.

Does the Counter-narrative Vindicate the Public-Health Model?

No doubt this counter-narrative, written with the help of physicians, seems to be a formidable critique of the mainstream account. Heart-valve damage from syphilis would have occurred before the arrival of penicillin and the antibiotic would not have repaired it.

However, penicillin would have cured inflammation and some subjects would have benefited from this. That the study subjects still had roughly comparable life expectancies to men who were never infected does not address the issue that the subjects were not fully informed about their new treatment options. Second, though downplayed, deception was definitely part of the study: for example, spinal taps were administered to some subjects. These painful tests were advertised as therapeutic, when they were nothing of the sort.

Even if one accepts all of the alternate account of Tuskegee, its proponents could not be more in error if they assume that such an acceptance should allay all concerns about public-health programs and their dangerous alliance between medicine and state. Two further programs should suffice to illustrate this.

The Guatemala Experiment (1946-1948)

While it is a myth that the Tuskegee subjects were deliberately injected with syphilis, this was not the case in the U.S. experiments in Guatemala that tested penicillin and the arsenical compound orvus-mapharsen.

USPHS gained access to Guatemalan clinics, hospitals, mental hospitals, and orphanages where, with no consent given, about 1,300 Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers, prostitutes, mental patients, and orphan children at least ten years of age were deliberately infected with syphilis, gonorrhea, or chancroid.

Both prisoners and soldiers were encouraged to have sex with prostitutes that they did not know were infected, and at least this part of the program was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Psychiatric patients were injected with syphilis below the back of their skulls and injected with gonorrhea through their urethras or eyes. Although a treatment program was implemented, only about 650 of the 1,300 who were deliberately infected received treatment.

Forced Sterilization (1907-1945)

While Briton Francis Galton provided the blueprints, American progressives were the first to initiate a eugenics movement, beginning in Indiana, which passed the first sterilization law in 1907. About 30 more states followed suit, with California being the most enthusiastic. By the movement's end, about 65,000 Americans deemed "morons" or "unfit" for procreation had been forcibly sterilized, with California having sterilized about 2,500 of its citizens.

Canada, France, and Sweden followed the U.S., but of course the most notorious imitator was Germany where the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was approved in 1933. This Nazi law was based on a model drafted by American progressive Harry H. Laughlin, an enthusiastic supporter of not only eugenics but "racial integrity" laws and the establishment of a global government. The 1933 Nazi law established genetic courts that decided whether particular Germans were fit for procreation. By the end of the Nazi era in 1945, about 200 genetic courts had ordered the forced sterilization of about 400,000 Germans.